9/30/12

madeline texted me yesterday morning wanting to drive somewhere out of LA. this is where we (me, mad, andisabel) ended up... after somehow being in a mall food court and getting yelled at by security guards for taking pictures of $1000 sparkly dresses.

highlights of the day: stopping to talk to a roadrunner while he ran down the street alongside our car, tickling sea anemones with feathers, and headstands in the sand.

9/27/12

i spent the last two days styling the Lip Service Cult lookbook + product shoot. seaghna and gryphon blew my mind with their perfect future nymph alien-ness. being around these two all day shouldn't be classified as work, really.

the more i work with Kill City, the more i respect/support them and want to help spread the word about their radness. Drew, the owner, is a rare breed who's top priority is to be different and authentic... which as you know, i'm a huge fucking advocate of. he's been running this company since the 80's and has infinite knowledge and taste to prove it. i feel really lucky to be around someone so real and down to earth (he duct tapes his boots together when they fall apart instead of buying a new pair, that's some real shit) in this industry, because that honestly does not happen very often.

Kali, my ridiculously talented friend who is now the part of the Kill City team in charge of creative direction for all photo shoots, let me take a huge garment bag full of new pieces from Kill City and Lip Service to style with on my, Madeline's, and Sea's blog. Madeline posted her first look a few hours ago, and it's so good i can hardly stand it. her write-up is a must read, so check it out here if you haven't already.

i'm styling the Cult division of Lip Service's (Kill City and Lip Service are both owned by Drew and ran out of the same warehouse) lookbook and product shots this week, and can't wait to show you guys some of this stuff.

for any fellow vegans out there, Lip Service uses a TON of vinyl and faux leathers, which is literally a dream come true. i posted a photo on my instagram of a pair of black sparkly vinyl high-waisted Lip Service shorts that i tried on last week and nearly ran out of the warehouse with, never to return. they are (seriously) the most perfect things i've ever put on, and the fact that they are vegan just blows my mind. they'll be available early next year, and trust me when i say i will be the waiting to purchase them with bated breath until then. i mean, just look at them.

alright, if you read all of that, you're amazing. i've been holding in all of this gushing until i did this post. Mad, Sea, and I will be posting more looks tomorrow and Wednesday, so check back if you're interested in seeing more new shit from Kill City/Lip Service.

you can also like them on facebook here & here, follow them on twitter here & here, and follow them on instagram here.

until then, i'll leave you with a teaser from the Kill City lookbook that Madeline and I styled in the desert a few weeks back! is there anything more perfect than motorcycles and babes in the desert? i don't think so.

9/20/12

welcome to our sun room! it's connected to my room, so i get to stare into it all day and bask in the sunshine like the lizard that i am. i switched rooms when Sea moved in, so this is my space now:

i've never been so happy, peaceful, and content in a room before. it's so bright and beautiful in here, i truly never want to leave. 95% of my room is thrifted, including both of those framed Mucha's (such amazing finds). feeling extremely lucky and full of positivity lately... the more positivity i exude, the more that seems to be returned right back to me.

9/19/12

We (meaning Madeline and a web designer) revamped the Tunnel Vision website a few days ago and new stock has been added all week long! We are shooting SO MUCH new product tomorrow, so be sure to follow us on instagram to see behind the scene photos (burritos and stupid hats will more than likely be involved).

we love you.

oh, and the two models above, sea and enaia, also just happen to be my two roommates. did i win the lottery or...?

9/17/12

warning: this is all going to sound crazy, but it only barely scratches the surface of the spiritual journey we have been going through for the past few weeks.

my friend justin from minneapolis is in LA visiting before he moves here. seaghna and i had the most indescribable, insane, dream-like spiritual experience of our lives last night which would be literally impossible to explain over the internet to a bunch of people who haven't been living in this house with us for the past two weeks... but to put it VERY simply, we have been freaking out over the fact that everything feels like it is falling to place like a puzzle, positivity is attracting itself, people of the exact type are finding each other after years and years of solitude, negative/bad people are unexpectedly falling out of our lives left and right, and everything just seems to be happening exactly how it was meant to. basically, the following happened because of this photo my friend sean took of the kites i hung on the ceiling above my bed two days ago:

i am freakishly obsessed with symmetry and everything in my life being symmetrical. i took over half an hour deciding which kites i wanted to purchase at a random hole-in-the-wall shop in china town. i decided on three lizards, but they were out of stock and could only sell me the one that was attached to their ceiling. i took that one, and the two birds, having had an incredibly difficult time trying to choose the correct ones. somehow i ended up dedicating my entire day to hanging these things on the ceiling. i knew they had to be symmetrical, but it was extremely hard to do while standing on my tip toes with my neck back, so i'd have to lay down on the bed to see if from the correct perspective and then get back up and adjust them every time. all of the sudden, i just knew the way they should go and stapled them to the ceiling quickly and effortlessly into what you see above.

i posted a photo of it on facebook, and when it loaded, my eyes focused on the negative space, revealing the silhouette of a bull head. my friend sean took the photo above yesterday morning, and that evening, sea and i both had it pulled up on our computers at the same time. i went in her room, and we started talking about how crazy the accidental bull silhouette was, and i wondered what a bull symbolized. she casually mentioned that the bull is the symbol for taurus, and her sister is a taurus, born on may 11. i screamed, "SEAN IS A TAURUS!" which took us down the rabbit hole of symbolism and the huge role it has been playing in our lives the past few weeks.

bull symbolism:

Standing your groundProviding for your tribeSelf-assertionCharging through obstaclesGaining stability and orderGrounding oneself in the wisdom of NatureHolding true to personal convictions

again, it would be impossible to describe, but every single one of those descriptions of a bull symbol is EXACTLY what we, and our cosmic/magically united group of friends, has been going through for the past 2 weeks. we had just been talking to rachel a few hours earlier about "standing our ground" and "holding true to personal convictions", and how we are all discovering how important and crucial those things are to us.

also before any of this happened, sea and i had been relating on the fact that we have both been completely obsessed with lizards all our lives, since we were little girls. we would each catch them and keep them as pets and they have been really important to us for as long as we can remember. we are also both intensely introverted people who have felt "different" than the rest of the world and couldn't ever quite figure out why, but it was just a gut feeling we have had and trusted for as long as we can remember. sea suggested that we look up lizard symbolism, and that just took us even further...

lizard symbolism:

"fondly regarded as an old family friend"

"the soul that humbly seeks enlightenment"

trusting primal instincts

i know, i know. this probably sounds so fucking insane to anyone just reading this. everything in our lives has been one big sign, lesson, and push into the exact place we are in now, creating a "full circle" effect. every single thing we brought up last night was brought back around to a full circle, leading right to where we have found ourselves, living together in this house. we were both covered in chills from head to toe with all our hairs standing on end. i am convinced that i naturally induced a psychedelic experience, because my brain/vision/thoughts were exactly the same as when i use psychedelic drugs... and i was not on them last night. sea stepped on an electrical cord with her toe and felt a shock ripple through her entire body, which would never usually happen just from stepping on a cord. we are 100% completely convinced that we tapped into something so cosmic and beautiful and perfect that we were absolutely overwhelmed with emotion and were just sitting on my bed in complete shock, trying to come to terms with what we just discovered about our lives.

what happened next is still making our brains hurt, because it is literally the craziest thing that has ever happened to either of us.

as planned for a few days, justin was on his way over. he has never met sea before, and i haven't seen or talked to him since i was in minneapolis over a month ago. he called to let me know he was here. i went outside to get him and apologized that he was about to walk into this sheer madness. he didn't seem bothered at all- he was actually happy to have walked into something so intense and wanted to hear the whole story. we sat down around my bed and started to tell him everything.

we only got to the first part about the bull being a symbol for taurus, and justin looked at us both and said,

"i'm a taurus. may 11th."

then sea and i jumped up and ran out of the house screaming.

justin's band, bollywood. they are fucking incredible and you should listen to their music here.

9/15/12

i wore this to Madeline's birthday party and to an entrance band show, so that makes this photo about... one month old.

more most important, Seaghnalives with me now. we still can't wrap our brains around how it all just happened and fell so perfectly into place, but it did, and i love her so much it's stupid. basically, i never want to leave my house, ever.

9/6/12

blogging has slowly made it's way down to the very bottom of my priority list, and i haven't put up much of a fight to stop it, either.

i'm turning 26 next month, and as terrifying as that is to say out loud (or type into a public forum, same difference), i am pretty damn pleased with where i am and more importantly, who i am. sure, i probably have about 10 bucks in my bank account right now, but i basically have to pinch myself every day when i realize how many incredible people i'm surrounded by.

my wonderful little blogging/internet community has turned into real life friendships (see pictured above: mad, isabel, seaghna, casey, rachel, sarah... not pictured: taylor, sabella, blake). i can't even begin to say how lucky i am to know all of these people. they are phenomenal human beings that make me hate the world SO much less.

living in my beautiful house with my perfect roommate enaia has resulted in a magical house party full of friends with our favorite bands playing in our backyard, with another one happening again tomorrow. it feels like we're really doing something special with this place, and that's exactly what i wanted... a place to just BE and love and enjoy friends and music.

as if all of this wasn't already enough, i've been consistently styling for Kill City, with a few photos above from the last lookbook shoot in the desert. i can't wait to see the photos, as i'm sure they will be incredible thanks to working with such a killer team of creative geniuses (kali, mad, graham, ramsell).

between all of this was FYF (which ended up being the craziest/weirdest day of my life. thank you psychedelic drugs for never letting me down), beach trips, and loads of Tunnel Vision work.

now that i summed up the last few weeks of my life in yet another instagram photo blog post, i'm off to the TV studio for a night of product shots, followed by a full day of Kill City product shots starting early tomorrow morning, followed by a party/show at my house tomorrow night, followed by another music festival, TV lookbook shoot, more Kill City product shots... you get the idea.

i'm in an amazing whirlwind right now and i just can't seem to break out of it to put on something other than a cut off t-shirt and shorts and take photos of myself to post on the internet for strangers to say "omg so cute!" because that does literally nothing to make me happier or be a more fulfilled person.

this turned into a rant when it wasn't suppose to, but my consistent goal with this blog is to hopefully inspire small changes in whoever might be reading it... and today i hope that small change might be to realize how beautiful life is and to just let yourself get caught up in it once in awhile & just be, despite how good or bad things are. plenty of "bad" things have been happening in between all of this good, but instead of freaking out, i've been attempting to ride the waves and focus on the positive aspects instead of the negative, and just let things unfold in front of me and adjust my path accordingly.

and with that, i'll leave you with this video (taken by the wonderful anthony) of my dear friend phil's band Juju playing their last song in my backyard a few nights ago. watching this makes my heart swell with love. the last two minutes are so beautiful it hurts.